From the mega bestselling author of Luckiest Girl Alive comes a remarkable story Inspired by the real-life sorority targeted by America's first celebrity serial killer. January 15, 1978, is a night of promise. A serial killer's escape in Aspen, Colorado, couldn't be further from the minds of the busy young women at the top sorority on Florida State University's campus in Tallahassee. Sorority president Pamela Schumacher spends her Saturday night glued to her desk, cradling her textbook like a pillow. Startled awake at three a.m. by a strange sound, she makes the fateful decision to investigate. What she finds outside her bedroom door is a scene of implausible violence-two of her sisters dead; two others, maimed. It is the final murderous spree of the man the papers will soon dub the "All-American Sex-Killer," but Pamela doesn't know this yet. Nor does she know the story of twenty- five-year-old Ruth Wachowsky who, four years earlier, disappeared from Seattle's Lake Sammamish State Park in broad daylight, confounding police and shattering Ruth's roommate and best friend, Tina Cannon. When the massacre at the Tallahassee sorority house becomes national news, Tina is certain it is the work of the same man who terrorized the Seattle area four years prior. She rushes to Florida on a collision course with Pamela-and one last impending tragedy. Bright Young Women is the story of two women who demanded answers to questions nobody else would ask. What happened to Ruth the day she went missing? And how did a serial killer from the Pacific Northwest set his sights on a sorority house in Florida? Toggling between those nightmarish days in 1978 and a letter that brings Pamela and Tina together in the present, the astonishing truth is revealed, along with a portrait of the extraordinary women who saw past the media's glorification of the "Kennedy of Killers" for who he really was.